Norbert Wiley , PhD

Norbert Wiley is professor emeritus of Sociology at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, and was Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Berkley. He is a prize-winning sociologist who has published on both the history and systematics of theory. In his book The Semiotic Self (University of Chicago, 1994) Wiley offered a new interpretation of the nature of the self. Wiley believes that the self can be seen as a "trialogue" in which the present self ("I") talks to the future self ("you") about the past self ("me"). A distinctive feature of Wiley's view is that there is a mutually supportive relation between the self and democracy,l and he traces this view through American history. In finding a way to decenter the self without eliminating it, Wiley supplies closure to classical pragmatism and gives new direction to neo-pragmatism.